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Suicide Squad takes on Justice League

Two of DC Comics' most prominent super-teams come head-to-head in "Justice League vs. Suicide Squad," a six-issue miniseries written by Joshua Williamson.

Art for the first issue is by Jason Fabok ("Justice League"), with a rotating cast of artists future issues, including Tony Daniel and Andy Owens. The series, which is being released weekly, brings Amanda Waller's Task Force X face to face with the Justice League.

"We were able to craft these really cool action scenes that allowed us to not only tell a big story, but also introduce these two big teams, with a lot of characters," Williamson said in an interview with The Oklahoman.

In the series, the Justice League is made up of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman, Cyborg and two Green Lanterns: Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz. In the first issue, they come across the Suicide Squad team, featuring Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, Killer Croc, Enchantress, El Diablo and Killer Frost.

With two teams of superpowered stars, Williamson wanted the proceedings to have a big-budget feel.

"That was the thing that I kept thinking about, were these big-budget blockbusters, kind of how disaster movies are," Williamson said. "You look at these movies, and they have different pieces and different scenes, but there's something seamless about it. And it tells this emotional story that feels vast, it feels big. And that was my priority ... doing something along those lines."

And those aren't the only players in the series. As the two teams clash, a character from the Justice League's past is assembling his own team.

"They all have their own motivations and things they are after," Williamson said. "Every character that we picked, it was not a random handful of characters. We picked that group for a reason, and you'll see as the series progresses what that reason is."

Coincidentally, Williamson and Fabok had worked together years ago, on a 2010 story in "Superman/Batman" that was Fabok's first professional work.

"I was already really familiar with Jason's work. So as I was writing, I was able to lean into things that he liked," Williamson said.

Fabok said in an interview with The Oklahoman that it was a rare opportunity to be able to reunite with Williamson on such a high-profile project.

"It's really neat to look back on your career and your time, all the time you spent honing your craft so you could get the opportunity to work on a big series for DC Comics," Fabok said. "And that they would have the confidence to put a book like this in your hands and trust you with creating and crafting a story that fans are really going to enjoy reading."

Fabok said his recent work with writer Geoff Johns on "Justice League" was good practice for the multicharacter battles of "Justice League vs. Suicide Squad."

"It's one thing when you're drawing a single character fighting a group of two or three bad guys, like Batman taking on a bunch of gangsters," Fabok said. "But it's another thing when you have to show that you have these two characters fighting this one guy; and another three characters taking on another three characters in the background. How do you place them all in a scene so that you can intercut them and not get too jumbled up? … It takes a lot of planning and a lot of layouts."

Features Editor Matthew Price has worked for The Oklahoman since 2000. He’s a University of Oklahoma graduate who has also worked at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and was a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund intern for the Dallas Morning News. He’s...
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